Bruce Soord says his upcoming album Ghosts In The Park emerged from deeply personal experiences that could not be absorbed into his work with The Pineapple Thief, despite his central role as songwriter and vocalist.
by Paul Cashmere
Bruce Soord will release Ghosts In The Park as a solo album shaped by personal crisis, memory and distance while touring internationally with The Pineapple Thief. The record, which Soord describes as a direct emotional document, was written across hotel rooms, European cities and South American stops during band touring cycles, and is scheduled for release as a standalone artistic statement outside the group’s catalogue.
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The significance of Ghosts In The Park lies in its origin story. Soord, who is the principal songwriter and voice of The Pineapple Thief, deliberately separated this material from the band’s collaborative framework. He says the subject matter, particularly his father’s extended illness and his mother’s long-term health condition, demanded an unfiltered, individual approach. The album therefore exists not as an extension of the band, but as a personal document of processing grief, memory and emotional distance.
Soord has confirmed that Ghosts In The Park was constructed during periods of touring downtime, often in hotel rooms using a mobile recording setup and acoustic guitars. He describes the writing process as immediate and instinctive, driven by time away from family and the psychological isolation that comes with travel.
Much of the material emerged while his father was in hospital for an extended period dealing with severe mental health complications and later Alzheimer’s-related decline. Soord recalls daily hospital visits alongside moments of reflection that would later become lyrical material. Similar emotional threads run through references to his mother’s long-term Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
One of the album’s key creative environments was Oberhausen in Germany, where Soord first began writing what would become the title track while sitting in a park during tour downtime. Additional material was developed in Chile, where imagery of coastal shipwrecks became a lyrical metaphor for memory loss and familial erosion.
Soord emphasises the acoustic foundation of the record, noting that many recordings were retained from hotel sessions because re-recording them in a studio stripped away their emotional immediacy. The album was not structured around commercial format expectations, with some songs evolving into extended compositions organically rather than by design.
He also confirms that John Sykes contributes bass to select material, adding a grounded counterpoint to Soord’s guitar-led approach. However, the overall construction remains centred on solo authorship, reinforcing its separation from The Pineapple Thief’s collaborative identity.
The Pineapple Thief has evolved into a fully collaborative four-piece, with Soord as primary songwriter but not sole creative force. Albums such as Magnolia and Versions Of The Truth reflect a group dynamic where arrangement and performance are shared responsibilities.
Soord’s solo output, including earlier work such as All This Will Be Yours, has historically functioned as a space for more personal or experimental writing. However, Ghosts In The Park marks a deeper separation in intent. Rather than exploring stylistic divergence, the album is positioned as a direct emotional record of lived experience.
The use of hotel room recording also aligns with a broader tradition in contemporary music, where touring artists document material in transient environments. Jackson Browne’s Running On Empty is a previous reference for the idea of capturing music in motion, although Bruce notes that the process is rarely as straightforward as expected.
Within his broader catalogue, Ghosts In The Park occupies a position closer to autobiography than composition, documenting a period defined by caregiving, memory recall and geographic displacement.
While Soord is unequivocal about the need for a solo release, the distinction between his solo and band work may not always be clear to listeners. Given his central role in The Pineapple Thief’s songwriting, some audiences may interpret the album as a stylistic extension rather than a structural departure.
However, the band’s current creative model distributes performance and arrangement decisions across all members, meaning material such as Ghosts In The Park would sit outside that collaborative process by design. Soord also acknowledges that the solo format allows for greater narrative intimacy and direct lyrical framing, without the interpretive layering that comes with group arrangement.
There is also an emerging live consideration. Soord plans to perform the material in duo format with John Sykes using loop-based arrangements, intentionally avoiding backing tracks. This approach reinforces the album’s stripped-back identity but introduces unpredictability into performance execution.
Ghosts In The Park stands as a document of time, place and emotional fragmentation, assembled across touring schedules and personal upheaval. For Bruce Soord, the record is less an addition to his catalogue than a separate entry point into his songwriting identity.
As he prepares to bring the material to live audiences in a stripped, loop-driven format, the album extends its original premise, music shaped by absence, distance and memory, performed in real time without studio reconstruction.
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